Drawing of the body without its skin from the French / SAT 10-23-21 / Online marketing giant with primate in its logo / L.A. jazz venue where Thelonious Monk recorded a live album / Manor house attendant / River with second-largest discharge volume in New World after the Amazon / First sch. to win 100 N.C.A.A. titles / Certain native of the Mideast / Chinmoy onetime India spiritual leader

There was worse to come, though. This time, the problem was less a fill obscurity problem and much (much) more a cluing problem. A cluing problem that just happens to occur at one of the toughest parts of the grid. I've never heard of the IT CLUB, and I won't be alone on that, but with crosses, ultimately, it's gettable (50A: L.A. jazz venue where Thelonious Monk recorded a live album, with "the"). But about those crosses ... I was lucky to "know"PIECAKEN, but I wonder if that's really a word in most people's vocabulary. Also, ew, gross, is it a pie inside a cake inside a *chicken*!?! Where is the "-en" coming from!? According the the NYT, it's "three types of pie stuffed into a cake," which sounds OK, but the name suggests nothing about "three" and still has the "chicken" part of it left over from TURDUCKEN (whence the name was borrowed by analogy—wow, just noticed TURDUCKEN has "turd" in it ... and people still eat it?). I'm not opposed to your food neologism, it's whimsical and fun, but like MAILCHIMP, it seems potentially exclusionary. Then there's BREVE, which is a fine term, one I think I've seen before, and I certainly wanted BREVE when I was staring at -EVE, but I was not at all certain. I know BREVE primarily as a coffee drink (latte variation with steamed half-and-half instead of steamed milk). As musical terms go, it's definitely on the lesser-known side, so now we've got twoITCLUB crosses that might lock people out (the two with the highest-value letters, too—PIECAKEN gives the you the "C" and BREVE the "B," which are the key elements in parsing ITCLUB). But still, this seems workable. Potentially. And yet. 

It turns out the worst (in the sense of actually unforgivable) part of this ITCLUB section is not an answer, but a clue—specifically the clue on FUEL UP (47D: Go from E to F). It's actually a great clue ... but not for this answer. I love the misdirection and general weirdness of the clue—the fact that it looks like maybe it's about musical notes. And I would've really enjoyed it if the answer had been FILL UP, because that is what the clue literally says and so that is what I wrote in. If you go to "F," you fill up. By definition. From "E" empty to "F" full. That's it. FILL UP. Nice clue, I thought ... only to discover that the answer is actually FUEL UP, which does not necessarily convey *filling* up your tank. It's a generic term for getting some gas. Go from E to F—that's a FILL UP. Fill, fill, a thousand times, fill. The "F" means "Full," not "Fuel." Respect your own damn clue. Woof x 1000. I cannot tell you how locked-in FILL UP was. And to think I was mentally *applauding* that clue. I don't know what the term is for that: when you have an answer and you think "that's a great clue for that answer!" only to find out through repeated hacking that your answer is actually wrong and the clue stinks. This is new territory for me, terminologically. Difficulty in puzzles is good, achieving it through obscure trivia is less good, botching your clues is outright bad. I need to get coffee now. Mwah. Cheers.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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